Popular works include the installationOld Peoples Home(2008), in which 13 hyper-realistic sculptures of elderly world leaders continuously wander through a small room in electric wheelchairs (Archer, 2019), and the controversial installationDogs Which Cannot Touch Each Other(2003), where eight dogs are strapped onto treadmills, able only to run forward (Baecker, 2017). In November 2021, the artwork suddenly gained viral attention on the popular video-sharing app TikTok. Can't Help Myself | Know Your Meme April 6 marks the five-year anniversary of the Humboldt Bronco's bus crash that claimed the lives of 16 players, coaches and staff, including Logan. Every time, just as the robot successfully gathers the liquid toward itself, it oozes away and slides down the floor, and the task begins again. When the sensors detect that the fluid has strayed too far, the arm frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges on the ground and splashes on the surrounding walls. In this regard, I will compare Sun Yuan and Peng Yus installation with another piece that shares with it similar themes, Marina Abramovic 1997 performance Balkan Baroque, during which the artist sat amidst a pile of cow bones covered in blood and diligently washed them clean one by one, while singing folk songs from her childhood home Yugoslaviaa war-torn country that no longer existed at the time of the performance. In the same vein, we humanscannot help ourselves. He Has A Living Grandson. 1974 Heilongjiang, China) first rose to prominence in the Chinese art scene because of their involvement with the Shock Art movement, which flourished in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Another user points out that, just like the robot, most people only work in order to live and find no meaning in it. How this robs us of our happiness, passion and our inner peace. In that case you could always just split the Ten-Tails off again. Encyclopaedia Britannica. industrial robot continuously sweeps blood-like fluid in sun yuan + peng yu's 'can't help myself' May 09, 2019 sun yuan and peng yu's silicon chair whips around violently at the venice art biennale Right now, various users are reposting the captured videos of the popular robot called "Can't Help Myself." One of these users is julia_bernard_ , which generated more than 2 million views . Contemporary art site Galleria Continua maintained several pages documenting the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Cant Help Myself among them. Humboldt Bronco Logan Boulet inspired an organ donation movement | CTV News It could be about anything. While we all die we die happy . On December 29 2016, the Guggenheim Museums official YouTube account shared a time-lapse video of Cant Help Myself going through its motions. The eventual encapsulation of the machine in the liquid it was supposed to sweep to the center led to it slowing down enormously. Based on Graeber, I would construct another interpretation of the artwork: even though the robot knows its efforts are in vain, it stillcant help itselfand continues to fulfill its duty every single day. Videos of Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's 2016 art installation "Can't Help Myself" have been going viral online, five years after the Guggenheim commissioned the work. As machines learn. to play the game that the richest people of the world have designed. The death of the Cant Help Myself robot left a lasting impression on the robotics community. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu - Can't Help Myself 2016 The art piece is an industrial robot caged in transparent acrylic walls. The blood-like liquid on the floor spreads around, making the robot's . About borders and control, death and survival, empathy and lack thereof, or about finding joy in the dullest of lives. part of the the international art exhibition may you live in interesting times, curated by ralph rugoff for the 2019 venice art biennale, the robot is placed within a transparent cage, almost like a creature captured and put on display. And Dogs Which Cannot Touch Each Other(2016), perhaps the piece from the artists that has received the most public attention and controversy, manacles two dogs to two running treadmills facing each other; at the same time that the two dogs endlessly run toward each other, they dont move an inch, forced to perform hours of pointless labor at the whim of the artists.[ii]. Between 1985 and 2002 he wrote art and cultural criticism for numerous periodicals, publishing widely in art magazines as well as newspapers, and published a collection of essays, Circus Americanus (1995). cannot help oneself. Can't Help Ourselves? - Sun in Gemini It also does a little dance if it has time, but it was programmed to dies and the fluid slowly becomes unmanageable and it died in 2019. For Link of the Body, the installation which features the bodies of two Siamese twin infants, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu won the 2002 young artist prize in the Contemporary Chinese Art Awards. That exhibition ended, and in May 2019,Cant Help Myself traveled to Venice for theMay You Live In Interesting Times exhibit through November 2019. Whereas the viewer for Untitled (Blood)must walk through the curtain of red beads in order to access the rest of the gallery, however, the viewer for Cant Help Myselfcan easily look away in disinterest or unease. The most obvious example that comes to mind, especially taking into account the fact that both Sun Yuan and Peng Yu have lived and worked in Beijing throughout their career, is the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, during which thousands of protesting students were shot down and murdered: an ugly chapter in modern Chinese history that remains excised from public education curriculum. A robot art exhibit by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, titled 'Can't Help Myself,' is going viral on TikTok, thanks to videos of the machine slowing down after years of being active. Additional local ballot measures may also be included. Continue with Recommended Cookies. Despite the original meaning of the piece being a take on migration and global borders, with the bloodstain-like marks representing the "violence that results from surveilling and guarding border zones," according to the Guggenheim, TikTok has found its own take on it all. What the artists doacknowledge in the public sphere are soundbites that roll off the tongue too easily and glibly, and which are almost entirely disjointed from the difficulty of physically beholding the piece. First commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for its 2016 Tales of Our Time exhibition, Cant Help Myselfsubsequently traveled to Venice in 2019, where it was shown at the Central Pavilion of the 58thVenice Biennale May You Live in Interesting Times. The exhibitionary contexts for the installation are telling. Pranol Mathew. 198w elisapzet @irenehdzt 184w Reply itsaelmnu fuck I like it so much 195w 1 like biggestkahuna808 Good murder roomba 196w fabio.milito I love this artwork so much 196w cristobalagusti187 Crazy 197w antoninima Sun Yuan and Peng Yus large-scale installation Cant Help Myself(2016) features an industrial robot made with stainless steel and rubber enclosed in a glass case. Sisyphus endless task consisted of repeatedly rolling a rock up a hill, only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top of the hill (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.). What does the can't help myself robot represent? Firstly, it offers a critique of how powerful governments deal with immigration and human life in border zones. Third-year Online Culture student at Tilburg University. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Proudly powered by WordPress That it died . As a gay artist who witnessed the spread of the AIDS epidemic and whose partner, Ross, eventually succumbed to medical complications related to HIV, Gonzalez-Torres here clearly refers to the bloodshed caused by the virus as well as the thundering public silence around it. In the end, the robotcouldnt help itself. The robotoffers a critical reflection on how our capitalist structures do not allow us to live life in a meaningful way, just like the robots life duty does not allow it to live a life of meaning. Where Abramovic attempts to wash away the history of injury that afflicts her homelanda land of the pastit is unclear for whom or for what the robot in Cant Help Myselfperforms its task. The death of the Cant Help Myself robot had a profound impact on the robotics community. Similarly, Is the can't help myself robot still alive? Link of the Body(2002) consists of the bodies of a pair of Siamese twins smeared in the blood, staged as a (futile) blood transfusion. In November, video of the Venice installation, which features a robotic arm that repeatedly swirls around and scrapes up a dark red substance resembling blood, became a meme of sorts on TikTok, with users setting it to sad music. As opposed to an immediate and involuntary reaction, the viewer is now invited and, indeed, allowedto behold the installation over an extended period of time and to receive the work on a range of affective registers. The ' can't help myself 'robot the artists The two artists that created the robot are Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. The installation features an industrial robot with a visual-recognition sensor, programmed to shovel liquid that spills from it back to the center automatically. Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. As the robot scrubs and sweeps the floor, stray drops of the liquid splash across the acrylic wall in the back and the surface of the case, beyond the perimeter of the robots reach. We are all in a loop of nothingness, that we cannot get out of. In the days leading up to the robots death, its creators noticed that something was off. The tales told in this exhibition consider our seemingly more connected, globalized world as one that is still filled with fractured land, fragmented history, and upended traditions, but, at the same time, they also propose ways to imagine culture differently. (Note: Is this article not meeting your expectations? This slick-as-hell tune is just a taste of the funk perfection to come. The shock factor of much of their work, which often border on horrific, amoral, and antisocial, has rarely interfered with their success in the Chinese art world.